Grants

The OFR has the statutory authority under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 to conduct, coordinate, and sponsor research to support and improve regulation of financial entities and markets.

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Past OFR Grants Initiatives

OFR-NSF Grants

Beginning in 2013, the OFR partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research related to financial stability with grants for up to two years each. We issued six research grants from 2013 to 2016.

OFR-NSF Grants Issued

Regulating Systemic Risk
NSF Grant No. 1560831, Awarded in September 2016, Two-year grant
Proposal by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop tools to support financial policymaking. The project addressed a number of policy questions in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 and used a theoretical framework to quantify effects of financial regulation on systemic risk.

Too Interconnected to Fail? Network Analytics on Complex Economic Data Streams for Monitoring Financial Stability
NSF Grant No. 1633158, Awarded in September 2016, Two-year grant
Proposal by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Florida. The project proposed to develop multilayer networks of financial entities based on several large databases and then create statistical tools to analyze them.

Dynamic Identification and Interpretation of Emerging Systemic Risks Using Textual Analysis
NSF Grant Nos. 1637369 and 1449578, Awarded in September 2014, Two-year grant
Proposal by a researcher at the University of Maryland to determine whether text-based information in firms’ Form 10-K filings can help identify emerging risks to financial stability. The project was designed to help build a set of tools to extract and interpret aggregate information in 10-Ks. Federal regulations require domestic publicly traded companies to file these forms annually.

Strategic Modeling of Dynamic Credit Networks
NSF Grant No. 1440360, Awarded in September 2014, Two-year grant
Proposal by a researcher at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor to study the stability of dynamic credit networks by adding the influence of empirical game-theoretic analysis to agent based models. The project applied recent developments in economics and computer science to risk analysis.

Distributed Computing Approaches for the Analysis of Enterprise and Systemic Risk Using a Financial Contract-Based Infrastructure
NSF Grant No. 1445403, Awarded in September 2014, Two-year grant
Proposal by a researcher at the University of South Florida to explore whether granular information collected from financial contracts can be used to determine economic risk exposures. The grant supported work to convert information from contracts into the mathematics of risk exposures.

Understanding High Frequency Trading Activity on the Nanosecond Time Scale
NSF Grant No. 1352936, Awarded in September 2013
Proposal by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the San Diego Supercomputing Center that focused on the impact of high-speed trading activity on the financial system. The project aimed to determine whether trading activity at the nanosecond level improves measures of market quality, such as bid-ask spread, market depth, and market efficiency or instead increases levels of volatility and instability.

Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration Challenge

In late 2015, the OFR and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) jointly announced a challenge for research teams to link four disparate financial datasets.

The Financial Entity Identification and Information Integration Challenge was designed for information specialists to develop technologies that automatically align diverse financial entity identification schemes from four key regulatory datasets and for researchers to create and curate a reference financial entity identifier knowledge base linking four heterogeneous collections of financial entity identifiers.

NIST issued a grant to the University of Maryland to run the challenge. The OFR participated only during the first year of the challenge.